Multiple Vulnerabilities Patched in ASRock Drivers

Established in 2002, ASRock is the third largest motherboard brand globally. Headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan, the company has branches in Europe and the United States. The maker offers a series of utilities that provide users control over certain settings and functions.

SecureAuth discovered a series of security flaws in AsrDrv101.sys and AsrDrv102.sys low-level drivers that the ASRock RGBLED and other ASRock branded utilities install. By exploiting these vulnerabilities, a local attacker can elevate privileges on the system.

The vulnerabilities were found in ASRock RGBLED, A-Tuning, F-Stream, and RestartToUEFI. The vendor has already released patched versions of each application: ASRock RGBLED v1.0.36, A-Tuning v3.0.216, F-Stream v3.0.216, and RestartToUEFI v1.0.7.

The low-level drivers are used to program and query the status on embedded integrated circuits. Thus, the applications can access fan performance curves, clock frequencies, LED colors, thermal performance, and other user-customizable properties and monitoring functionality.

One of the main issues discovered by the researchers was that these drivers would expose functionality to read and write control register (CR) values. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2018-10709, could be abused to run code with elevated privileges.

Another issue the researchers discovered was related to input/output control code in the driver, which exposed functionality to read and write arbitrary physical memory, also leading to privilege escalation (CVE-2018-10710).

The driver also exposes functionality to read and write Machine Specific Registers (MSRs), which an attacker could leverage to execute arbitrary ring-0 code (CVE-2018-10711), SecureAuth reveals.

Functionality to read/write data from/to IO ports was also exposed, allowing an attacker to run code with elevated privileges (CVE-2018-10712).

The security researchers reported the findings to ASRock in March, and the company was able to resolve the issues within a month. According to SecureAuth, the new driver architecture was rolled out to ASRock utilities only in August.